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Steam Big Picture Mode Goes Live

Valve announced the public release of Big Picture, Steam's new mode that lets gamers access Steam on a television from the comfort of their sofa.

To celebrate the public launch of Big Picture, over thirty controller-friendly games will be on sale from now until December 10, with savings up to 75% off.

Access to the complete Steam store is included, as is the Steam Community. Big Picture is available worldwide in over twenty languages, including German, French, Russian, Korean, and Portuguese.

Steam gamers may easily experience Big Picture on their televisions by connecting their PC or Mac, typically with a single HDMI cable. Big Picture also includes a new web browser designed for televisions and game controllers. It is accessible from anywhere within the Big Picture UI, and even while playing Steam games on a TV. It supports Big Picture's new method of typing with a gamepad, which is useful for entering URLs, filling out forms, chatting, and other functions.

Big Picture has been designed to be used with a traditional gamepad, while also fully supporting keyboard and mouse input.

Comments

The FPS browser is a different experience. I personally like typing using the controllers. Having used an X360 for a long time, typing on the X360 controller is ridiculously stupid. And they never changed it. I guess if its for the benefit of the consumer that has small or no possible benefit in revenue, micro$oft will just ignore it. But mind u, $team is the same.
Analog text typing is much much better than that fkn X360 typing crap.

i dont know, i think they optimized the steam client for a tv screen, probably they also give you the possibility to use a joypad to navigate in it. It doesnt sound like a revolution for sure, but it looks like they are slowly and carefully approaching to console gamers...they need to hide the complexity of a computer somehow..to dumb it down :D

That being said, I like how steam implemented typing in gamepads. They call it daisy wheel, basically you use the left analog stick to pick a set of four characters one for each of the four main buttons in the gamepad. you have 8 different directions in the analog stick, thus 32 possible characters and L/R buttons used as modifiers for caps and other stuff. It sure beats an on screen keyboard for typing speed.